The disclosure relates to filtering content based on user mobile network and data-plan. Specifically, the disclosure relates to filtering the content for display to a user based on quality of network the user's mobile device is on and amount of data-plan left with the user.
If a user is using a mobile application (e.g., a social network application) and is on a poor network connection (e.g., 1 bar edge network), his/her experience can be very frustrating if content requested by the user is delivered in low quality or is not interesting data. Some of the problems associated with a poor network connection are 1) retrieving a normal number of social posts to load at start may take a long time, 2) once the posts are loaded, the content may not be interesting, consequently the user wasted time waiting for the load, and 3) even if the content is interesting but otherwise includes a lot of media items (e.g., photos, videos, etc.), the user may find it frustrating or impossible to download the media items because of his/her poor network connection, again wasting the user's time.
Presently, there is no way for a user to set preferences for what level of content quality or characteristics that must be met when using the user's data plan or have a content providing server automatically take that into consideration before sending back content to the user for display. In other words, the user can't tell an application that “data and/or network bandwidth are tight—only give the best content”. There currently isn't a solution that takes in a combination of the user's network bandwidth availability, amount of data left in the user's data plan, and the quality of content to determine if only content of high relevance to the user should be rendered at a time of poor network connection and/or low data plan availability and the rest should be queued up for another time when the network and data plan constraints do not exist.